SOUNDINGS

by Gary K. Wolfe

Beccon Publishing

1-870824-50-4

415pp/£15.00/2005

Gary K. Wolfe has been a long-time reviewer for Locus, and 1992
marked his first full year with the magazine. In Soundings,
Wolfe has collected most of his review columns from the first five years,
along with his annual year-in-review columns, to provide a snapshot of what
those five years had to offer the science fiction reader.

In general, it is difficult to review a collection of reviews. At
first glance, you can agree or disagree with the reviewer, but that hardly
makes for a review (instead, it summons images of Monty Python's Argument
sketch). Fortunately, Wolfe's reviews provide much more than simply an
opinion of the book he is examining.

Wolfe, who teaches as Roosevelt University in Chicago, has a vast
knowledge of science fiction, both the genre's history and the works
published within the field. When reviewing books, Wolfe is able to
bring that knowledge to the forefront, offering an history lesson along with
his opinions of the books he is discussing. This external knowledge is also
something a reader, or reviewer, can hang an opinion on to make more than
simply a contradiction.

In discussing Janet Gluckman and George Guthridge's Child
of the Light, Wolfe comments that writing about the logic of history
doesn't lead to angry letters as playing with hard SF, although most
alternate history authors would disagree. This review also spotlights
something else about Soundings. The first book of a trilogy, as
Wolfe notes, but Wolfe did not review the subsequent volumes. This is the
sort of thing which isn't necessarily obvious when reading reviews over
time, but in a collection, it does give a feeling of unfinished business
(the second volume Child of the Journey was published in 1996, during
the purview of Soundings, while the last volume wasn't published
until 1997).

When Wolfe is able to examine multiple volumes in a series, as he
does with Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, it is interesting to see not
just how the plots evolve, for which reading the book is a better procedure,
but to see how the reviewers expectations of the story change over
time. Wolfe's reviews comment on the individual books, but also on the
way the fit together and the way Robinson's depiction of Mars changes across
the three books.

A collection of five years worth of reviews also allows the reader to see
thematic trends in a way which isn't possible in the way the reviews
originally appeared. While in some cases, Wolfe may discuss books on a
similar theme in a single review, as he did in November 1993 when he
reviewed both Robinson's Green Mars and Greg Bear's Moving Mars,
but also allows the reader to see other works, such as Ben Bova's Mars
and Kevin J. Anderson's War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches

Dipping into Soundings will not only provide the reader with a
look at some of the excellent (and sometimes not so excellent) science
fiction from the mid-1990s, but will also, perhaps more importantly, provide
the reader with a better understanding of what science fiction is and how it
evolved during that period.